May 6, 2010

I've only seen some of Lucia Perillo's poems here and there in magazines, but I've liked what I've seen. In "Early Cascade" I struggle a bit with the opening of the second stanza, but I think she concludes with a knockout punch.

Here's another one, this time about animals. I know there are some dog lovers out there, and I'll be surprised if they don't respond.

6 comments:

Early Cascade - two poems in one? A tomato delicacy poem followed by the bitterness of loneliness?

Are we still on the 'confessional' theme?

So, in Early Cascade - the first stanza is so wonderfully descriptive. Without telling us where she is eating the tomato - where did the poem take you? To your kitchen table? Or were you standing over the sink as you sunk your teeth into that fleshy, not bitter, first tomato? Couldn't you just picture the scene - yet she didn't describe its location!

Second stanza "at last, it comes". There, she said it out loud. The loneliness. This stanza needs no physical description (IE, what room is she is now?) because it all takes place in her heart. At last, the loneliness. WHAM - my own heart sunk.

The second poem does nothing but create an argument in our family. Two adults, four dogs - and we adults are arguing.

Brenda, not sure I can explain why, but these don't feel confessional to me. My understanding is that confessional work goes over the top in the personal stuff it reveals; the audience feels tension because they're not sure they want to or should be hearing this personal (intimate?) stuff. It's a subjective thing, but I don't feel that way here.

Nice questions about how she gets from A to Z in "Early Cascade." I can't answer them all, but I think those tomato stages set up the WHAM. She was not, and therefore we were not, expecting this wham. Therefore, the wham. That unexpectedness often the case with whamness. If it's not exactly epiphany, it's something very like epiphany, isn't it? But careful, poet. You don't want to trick the reader. It's about sharing, not tricking, not ha ha, guru poet, peasant reader. No, none of that, please.

Brenda, I have two friends who won't speak to each other, partly because they disagree on the possibility of altruism in animals. The nastiest word in the human language might be "maybe."